Venice is, to coin an inexcusably ugly word to describe an inexpressibly beautiful thing, the most “pinakogenic” of cities. What is photogenic looks good in photographs. What is telegenic looks good on TV. But what is pinakogenic has a knack for showing itself to best advantage in a painting. And no city on earth has inspired more painters to higher achievement than the Most Serene Republic of the Adriatic.

First came Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini in the 15th century, then Canaletto in the 18th Century, J.M.W. Turner in the first half of the 19th century, and Whistler in the second half. Surely not the least of the painters in this tradition, however, was John Singer Sargent, whose views of Venice, painted at the turn of the 20th century, are the subject of a new exhibition at Adelson Galleries.

Sargent is best known, of course, as a portraitist. And like not a few great portraitists in the history of art, he affected to disdain this source of his bread and butter in favor of other genres to which he fervently believed he was better suited. It appears that everything he did — even outside of the fine arts — he did with effortless success, and his genre scenes, his landscapes and the oils and watercolors of Venice now on view at Adelson are all dazzling and virtuosic. But nothing Sargent ever did can match that magisterial selfconfidence, that control within spontaneity, that he brought to his portraits.

In his views of Venice, by contrast, we find Sargent struggling or, if the phrase will be excused, treading water. When Sargent struggles, however, it is not the same as when other artists struggle. He will never show you the battle, and the result is invariably impressive. What defines his struggle, rather, is the way in which that superficiality, that inclination to traffic in visual tropes — though never entirely absent from even his best efforts — attains to dominance.

As Warren Adelson, owner of Adelson Galleries, details in an essay in the newly published “Sargent’s Venice” (Yale University Press), the painter conceived many of the scenes on display by rowing around the Venetian canals. To achieve the results he did while sitting in a listing gondola is impressive in itself. The result, however, was as typical of his generation as it was different from that of his forebears. Canaletto’s views of Venice have all the highminded, ceremonious breeding of Bronzino’s portraits of the princes of Tuscany and Ferrara. Turner paints exactly what Canaletto paints, but floods it with the softfocus Romanticism of Berlioz’s music. Whistler, unlike his predecessors, is aware of the underbelly of the city, but everything is subordinated to aesthetic effect. What is merely dreamy in Turner’s work becomes narcotic, even neurotic in Whistler’s.

In Sargent, however, the guiding sensibility is that of the camera. He has a loose, late Impressionist touch, but his choice of subject matter and the way he composes the images presuppose that way of seeing that emerged in tandem with the art of photography. For the first time, the scrim of visual preconceptions has been largely removed, and the world — “as it really is” — stands unveiled.

In his various views of Santa Maria della Salute, for example, Sargent does not show us the entirety of the building, as Canaletto and Turner had done, but rather a truncated, off-kilter view of a few steps and the bases of two columns taken out of context. In a watercolor like “Behind the Salute,” Longhena’s great church is further obscured by a prickly fretwork of masts and hulls that all but hide it from view. There is nothing dreamy, narcotic, or mythic about these images. They aspire to the precise register of reality upon the retinas of the painter.

It follows that, despite the willful eccentricity of their angles of observation, despite the dash and dazzle of their brushwork, these are among the most dispassionate works ever made. There is no feeling or emotional commitment in any of these works. The point was to register reality as Sargent saw it, to control it without commenting upon it. But the problem with this dispassion is that it has no passion, as it must if dispassion — the terminal coolness of Agnes Martin, for example — is to succeed as an artistic attitude. You have the impression that whether Sargent’s soul was or was not engaged as he sat their in his gondola on the Grand Canal, it would have made no difference to the outcome of his pleasant views of Venice.

Until March 3 (19 E. 82nd St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-439-6800).